REVIEW: Venom (2005)

Today we are going to be looking at a movie by Jim Gillespie! You know. The guy responsible for such classics as I Know What You Did Last Summer and D-Tox. Yeah, you’re probably asking yourselves, why am I even doing this to myself? I’ve already experienced the utmost ineptitude of this man twice before, so why should I even bother with his third film at all? Well, I’m nothing if not a completionist. So let’s take a look at Venom!

No…

Not quite…

Director: Jim Gillespie

Starring: Agnes Bruckner, Jonathan Jackson

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0428251/

There we go!

So, Netflix envelope, what do you have to tell us about this movie? “Exploring the murky swamps outside of New Orleans, a group of young people don’t expect to have company. But they meet Mr. Jangles, a madman who’s possessed by 13 unlucky souls killed by a voodoo priestess who now spends his time hunting victims. With each new body, he adds a key to his ring of death – and an extra jangle to his calling card.”

Get used to that because it is NOTHING like the movie I just saw! And I’m being serious there. That’s not even what this movie is about at all; no Mr. Jangles, no exploring swamps, nothing about exactly 13 souls – none of that. Either Netflix just screwed up, or – the more likely answer – the people who made this movie just didn’t give a rat’s ass about getting anything right. The rest of the movie pretty much confirms those suspicions, so let’s go ahead and watch it.

We start off in the murky swamps outside of New Orleans, where an old lady is digging a hole for her career after this movie. She touches a weird little necklace thingy and gets a flashback of some of her better days from it, filled with tortured screams. Then she does some more chanting and the screen cuts abruptly to a little fast food joint where a bunch of pretentious college kids angst about their “backwards” town – which we never really see outside of the diner, so it’s pretty pointless. One guy named Eric is having girl troubles because his ex, Eden, is working at the counter of the diner and he’s too nervous to go talk to her! Because he’s a wuss.

Meanwhile she’s feeling nervous, too, but it’s OK, because her supportive generic black friend tells her everything will be cool in the end, because she has a feel for these things. But unless that means that the two of them will both be hunted by a supernaturally powered serial killer, then I’d say her feel is a bit off its game tonight. We then get introduced to a guy named Ray, who drives in what looks like a big military tank and is apparently hated by most of the town for no discernable reason. His son is Sean, who hangs out with the main characters. Apparently Ray walked out on Sean and his mother when Sean was young, and so that’s one reason why Sean hates him…and I guess we’re supposed to care or something…I don’t know. I was struggling to stay awake.

After work, Eden goes riding on her bike in the rain when she’s confronted by Eric, who parks his car in the middle of the road right next to a bridge so he can talk to her. They have a talk that basically boils down to this: Eric doesn’t like that she wants to go to a different college than the one they planned, even though she obviously would be happier there. Like any good boyfriend he doesn’t care about what she wants, and only wants what’s best for himself. Yeah, yeah, whatever; can we get to the part where they die now?

So Ray comes up behind them in his super monster truck and warns them to get off the road before an accident happens. Then irony strikes and an accident happens to him instead, as the lady from the opening sequence comes over the bridge and swerves to avoid his truck, sending her little car halfway off a bridge. Ray goes to save her and he does, but then she tells him to get the box in the back seat, which has snakes in it! I always love carrying boxes with snakes in the back of my car on long rainy nights. It’s only logical.

"Why'd it have to be snakes...?"

So Ray gets surprised, causes the car to sink and ends up going down with it. The police find him later and can’t tell if he died from a snake bite or from drowning, but I guess either way the implausibility of the whole scenario is still a mile high. And his wounds look NOTHING like snake bites! It’s more like he was just drooled on by a radioactive catfish. Which would make a much more interesting movie, actually.

But yeah, he comes back to life and kills some useless random characters. The next day everyone is having fun despite the odd tragedy that happened, when they find out that even more people are dead. The one girl, CeCe, whose grandmother was actually the old lady from the beginning has retreated to her grandmother’s old fashioned big house in the middle of a swamp, so that’s where Eden and her friends go. CeCe tells them a nice fairytale about how mambos could take the evil out of stuff and put it into snakes. Then she says that that’s what all the snakes were about, and that Ray has all the evil in him now, so he’s Jason Voorhees.

"I'm like a more boring Jason!"

"Damn right."

But seriously, you'd think the old hag would have tried to be more careful with all that evil riding around in her car...oh, who am I kidding anyway? There wasn't any logic put into this. Don't think that's going to stop me from complaining about the rest of the movie anyway though.

Ray goes around and does silly little things like turning peoples’ cars over, because that clearly shows how evil he is. Actually I don’t even think that part was supposed to be in the script. Some local kids probably just saw them filming this stupid thing and flipped the car over while no one was watching, and then the director just decided to keep it in the script. You go Jim Gillespie! Always with the pointlessness. You could argue that this was done to keep them from leaving. But it wouldn’t really matter anyway, since possessed Ray can clearly pretty much kill whoever he wants, whenever he wants at any time. So…yeah, pointless.

Meanwhile we get a scene from another movie that Gillespie probably just stole, and we see that Sean is freaking out because everyone compares him to his deadbeat dad Ray, who is obviously now killing everyone. It’s actually not a bad scene, and with some tweaking, could have been fairly emotional. But then they go and join the Voodoo House Party where the other characters are, and the movie just goes back to being pointless and irrelevant.

Ray kills a few people in boring ways, including Sean, who – get this – the group decides to turn him into a human voodoo doll. And it works. Seriously, movie; a human voodoo doll that actually works? That’s so stupid it’s practically astronomical. But yup, they’re actually doing it, because I guess you can do whatever you want as long as you have voodoo as an excuse! But they don’t get to do it as smoothly as they would have liked. Ray is apparently the smartest voodoo-possessed zombie ever, as he manages to tie some chains to the house, tie those to his truck and then rip off the front of the house. They try stabbing his dead-voodoo-doll-son a few times and it actually works, harming him, but after he kills CeCe, they run away and leave Sean’s body there, even though CLEARLY they could easily use it to finally kill Ray once and for all. But this movie isn’t long enough yet. We need to add more crap to pad out the length!

They have a car race, and Ray decides he wants to go fishing, and throws his chains to where they land PERFECTLY around the throat of one of the other girls, who he pulls out of the car hook, line and sinker. The others try to save her but fail, and she gets impaled. They never at any point think about going back and using the voodoo doll to kill Ray, but they do decide the best idea is to drive to the swamp and run around there, where his evil lair conveniently is. Oh you stupid, stupid people. But we’re not at an acceptable movie length time yet. We need to keep the clock running!

"Spreading my arms out like this makes me look REALLY ominous!"

So Eden hides in his…random coffin of dead bodies…because obviously even though he’s smart enough to operate a vehicle and coordinate a trap to rip the front side of a house off, he won’t ever notice an extra body in there that he didn’t kill. Dumbass. But Eric sacrifices himself and Ray gives him some extremely cheap and quick brain surgery, so it’s OK in the end. Eden tries to sneak up on Ray from behind, but he literally has an eye in the back of his head and catches her before she can do this. They fight, she actually CATCHES HIM ON FIRE and pushes him down into a hole, but it’s OK again because the fire magically all burns out by the time he hits the floor. Must be that K-Mart brand. She gets out of the hole and instead of killing him, just closes it up and runs away. Hey, let’s check that timer.

Hmmm, nope, still need an extra 5-10 minutes of padding! Let’s see what we can excrete from the bowels of cinematic pointlessness…

How about we have her get in his truck at the end and run him over so hard that he bursts in half and has snakes come out?

Yeah I think that’s a wrap. Roll the credits and go home. No, seriously. That’s really all that happens. They roll the credits right after he dies, like they were saying “Nope, we’ve wasted enough of our audience’s time already. Just put the credits up after the villain dies and we’ll call it a day.” That’s very considerate of you, movie.

All in all, this movie wasn’t that bad. It certainly wasn’t good, but I can say I’ve seen worse. At the end of the day it was mostly just forgettable.

No, no, no, no…this is the end of the month! I can’t just end a month with such a tiny whimper of a review conclusion! I’ve got to make it BIG and EPIC and MEMORABLE! I know. I’ll conveniently forget about the movie’s redeeming qualities and just rave about the bad points, exaggerating them for comedic purposes. Doesn’t that sound fun? OK, go:

This was the worst thing since Hitler! It truly embodied everything immoral and sinful about the human race, and proved once and for all that there are no good movies after the year 2000. Because after 1999 there came a horrible plague upon the movie world that simply wiped out any and all quality whatsoever. And this movie, this Venom by Jim Gillespie, was the absolute nadir of that Holocaust of cinema! Venom represents all that is wrong with the world, and if you like it, your head should be placed upon a stake and left to rot in the cold wastelands of the arctic. And everyone should agree with me, for I am truly the bastion of…uh, truth.

And now I'm bored. Review over, then.

Review: D-Tox (2002)

Director: Jim Gillespie

Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Charles S. Dutton, Polly Walker, Kris Kristofferson

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160184/

When I say Sylvester Stallone, what do you think of? A horrible slasher-thriller that rips off every other slasher and every other thriller ever made, is run through an unbearable miasma of white snow and dark shadows so that you can't see anything that's going on and has no trace of anything resembling good filmmaking? Oh, you...don't think of that? That's because nobody knows about this movie, called D-Tox, and rightfully so. This movie is so bad that Universal Pictures doesn't even want to admit that they distributed it. It's so horrible that it actually has a reputation for being unwatchable among film critics. How bad can a Stallone-ified slasher movie get? I bet you're just on the edge of your seat for that one!

Our movie begins with a rambling onslaught of deep-throated narration that is so pretentious that even the SAW team didn’t want it. It’s also done in the most garbled, slurred voice ever used for one of these serial killer manifestos – I think some speech classes are in order, guys. Make sure you can enunciate your words before you go all philosophical and try to justify your killings. I think Jigsaw is rolling in his grave right now.

I want to play a game...a game far away from anything to do with this movie...

Then we switch to Sylvester Stallone buying a wedding ring for his wife before going out and drinking with a bunch of angry, drunk cops who are trying to catch that guy from the opening sequence after he killed one of their own – or something like that. It’s all pretty well, but why the hell does he come back inside his house with a little wind up cymbal monkey? Is it supposed to…represent the deep emotions running through Stallone as he wrestles with his own grief as well as the proposition of marrying his wife? Either way, they’re happy here, which most likely means they won’t be soon enough.

After that we see one of the cops from before stumbling around in his dark house when he hears a knock at the door. He calls out to his friend Jimmy and sarcastically asks if he is going to tuck him in – and then is promptly greeted by a power-drill through the eyehole of the door. If only they just wouldn’t look through the damn thing then I guess he wouldn’t be able to kill them as easily – but this guy does and is promptly shot by the murderer, because I guess knives and chainsaws are out of fashion – even though he uses a knife later on, making this whole thing kind of silly. Oh, and his tag line is “ICU” cut across their faces in blood, with their eyes gouged out. Yeah, with their eyes gouged out, like they just saw an advanced screening of the movie they had made. And really, “I see you”? Could you possibly pick a more generic serial killer tagline? Scooby Doo villains have had better.

And wouldn’t you know it? Stallone’s wife is killed in the very next scene; they really aren’t wasting any time here. Apparently the killer is doing this because Stallone led the case against him years ago when he was trying to kill prostitutes. “Oh no, he tried to stop me from doing a crime? HOW HEINOUS!” Seriously; they obviously didn’t catch this guy, so what the hell? If Stallone stopped him then why don’t they know more about him? Shouldn’t they have some clues as to who he is if he’s already committed some terrible crimes in the past? Why did he wait until now to attack Stallone’s wife? ANWERS, MOVIE. I DEMAND THEM!

So after a series of Se7en rip-offs the movie decides that it’s bored with this time period and switches to three months later, where the big black Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince knockoff who is apparently the FBI captain comes in and finds Stallone sitting alone at a bar, looking miserable. He tells him about a detox center run by cops for cops, and Stallone doesn’t really want to do it. He hands Stallone a gun and tells him to blow his own head off. Stallone doesn’t do that, and he just gets up and leaves. Uncle Phil stands there shouting at him but does not try to follow him or do anything else really – real true friend there, huh? Stallone goes home and drinks in the rain and then slits his wrists, because even though a gun won’t do it for him, I guess slitting his wrists is just fine.

We cut to another time later where it’s unclear what happened after the whole wrist-cutting scenario, with Stallone just driving in the car with Uncle Phil to the detox center. Did we miss a scene or something? I thought he didn’t want to go to this place. What changed? Anyway, it looks like a giant metal porto-potty stuck halfway in the ground. Just look:

So we go through a sequence of scenes with the patients at the detox center – which is more like a fortress as it is completely isolated from society in a snowy wasteland – talking with Kris Kristofferson and “battling their demons” – which is stupid, as they aren’t really doing much but arguing and wallowing in misery. Real top notch detoxification program you got there, doc!

Stallone makes friends with this woman who for some reason is sympathetic more with him than with the other patients…but then to be fair, maybe it’s because he is the only guy in this damn place who isn’t neurotic, doesn’t have a stick up his ass and isn’t older than dust. One of the other guys somehow finds a needle and kills himself with a drug overdose. I guess the security system just really sucks, doesn’t it? How about some…I don’t know, cameras or something to monitor these things? Seriously, what kind of morons would just leave lethal drugs lying around for a bunch of junkies and addicts who are obviously depressed to get at any time?

Then we see more of Kristofferson’s brilliant ideas of healing as one of the guys picks on this old man cop for letting his partner die on the field, making him cry. The first guy then starts saying that this is an example of why the program won’t work, because the guys are too damaged.

…seriously? Seriously?! That’s ridiculous! You can’t just bully the victim of a horrible tragedy right after he was admitted to a place to get better and then say the program won’t work when he gets broken up about it! That’s why he was admitted in the first place! What are you, retarded? This is like saying, “hey, I think we should just kill mental patients instead of trying to treat them. Clearly they’re already too far gone and any amount of treatment will never change who they are inside. So c’mon! Throw ‘em in the burner!”

Ugh. And then the douchebag continues acting like an ass even when this other guy gets sick and starts having convulsions. He even makes fun of Stallone for his wife dying. Who is this guy? Where did they find him, the asshole farm of America? He’s completely one dimensional; it’s like watching a cartoon character. Doesn’t he have any humanity or remorse at all? Why the hell is he even in here? He doesn’t seem to have any problems beyond just being a crazy fuck!

“HAHA, your wife got butchered by a psychotic killer who you still haven’t apprehended yet! You’re so stupid!” Man, this movie makes about as much sense as a feminist at a strip club.

So the next twenty minutes or so mostly consists of a very half-baked, uninspired murder mystery as we try to figure out who’s killing all of these people and making it look like a suicide. Kris Kristofferson even gets the ax in classic slasher style from this dude in a parka with his face covered…it’s revealed that apparently one of the orderlies at this giant metal dildo in the ground was actually a veteran who killed his squad leader on a mission, or something like that. Why did they hire him? This is so stupid that even the characters can’t believe it as they rightfully express their astonishment! But it’s never really brought up again, making this entire scene completely useless.

Then the movie turns into a bloody white Christmas as we see our indistinguishable personalities run around in the snow and get hacked up by the killer, who is apparently incredibly lucky to have the most convenient snowstorm in the world to attack these guys in. Somehow, in the flurry of cold snow and wind, he actually gets one of the guys hanging from something. Yeah, apparently he took the time to do an incredibly elaborate ritualistic kill in the middle of a FUCKING SNOWSTORM. Never mind that he just kills some of the other guys with a knife to the throat or something, because that’s not inconsistent. OK, writers. I know it’s hard to use your basic brain functions to come up with a plot thread that is at least a teeny bit realistic, but you’re going to have to try. You’re going to have to try for the sake of all of us.

"I" think that's incredibly retarded...

Oh, wait, what’s that? We find out a few scenes later that he also wrote “ICU” underneath that guy’s eyelids? Yes, folks, this movie has now turned into a retarded ‘ghosts of the past come back to haunt you in the most incredibly implausible ways’ slasher made popular by…oh, God, you’re not serious. No wonder! This movie was made by director Jim Gillespie, who also made I Know What You Did Last Summer. Now it all makes sense! Of course this movie is a retarded brain mash of epic proportions. Of course it has no bearings or groundings in reality or any kind of good taste. Now I get it!

Oh, right. I’m still doing the review. They find out it’s this British guy who did it all the whole time, do not marvel at his incredible lack of a life as he wasted this much time on an elaborate plan to mock this one specific FBI agent, and then it just sort of ends in a crappy dissolving montage. Phew.

I think drinking a lot would be a viable solution to forgetting D-Tox. I wouldn't begrudge you for taking that route if you've seen this one. I mean, this makes I Know What You Did Last Summer look like a masterpiece! There’s just nothing about this tripe that is in any way compelling. I was hoping this would be kind of funny or campy or something – it’s a slasher movie with Sylvester Stallone for Pete’s sake! – but it’s not even that. The plot is stupid beyond belief, the characters are so transparent they might as well just be like the little stick figures you see on public restrooms with name plates slapped on them, and it’s just DULL. Everything about it just sucks. So fuck you Jim Gillespie! I think I’m going to go call the Expendables to dispose of this toxic cinematic waste…